Shall it?

This morning the sky leaks red, sun streaming through the freshly windexed glass onto the marble surface of the front desk that I guard, where newspapers are ferried, reading "war".

I have stood there throughout the night, like a good king's man, watching the silent reports spit their numbers. The Auditor never gets involved directly but watches over. This is what the dead and the inert look like, I think. Numbers.

But the numbers I read have had no life attached to them in the first place. My job is not heroic, despite what I otherwise think. These are sales reports. The real story of life and death can be told by the sun, as it moves from one side of the sky to the other, it's yearning, burning, blazing, jealous, death. I am just the man who recieves the message.

Red: the colour of fire, the colour of alarms, the colour of fury. It all explodes and unleashes then splatters and putters out in one. Last. Breath.

Bombs burst over Lebanon in a place where Jesus never set foot -Beirut. There were Jews buried there. Now there are bodies buried everywhere -Gentiles too. It was "hallowed land" but now it serves as a place where spirits are freed too easily of their bodies, where innocent victims feel the wrath of hostility, of a scare-tactic negotiating strategy for someone else's soldier and nothing is holy enough.

In vain, sailors try to take the terror train. Fire against fire. With a home-made missile they get sunk in flames.

I come home to my mother. We are lucky to have that. I write a letter. I sink deeper into my exhaustion. She prepares me something salty in a glass.

What is there to be done besides quietly sipping it in? Shall it be just another day? What was it and when did it start anyway? It is, after all, like any other day, for me. This all started before I even got here.

We drink a bloody Mary.

Poetry